Definitely an excuse cooked up by Trump, because only Lord Dampnut could use a real estate reason and blame Obama even if it was a decision made by G.W. Bush. He would have been better off with some TMZ-worthy excuse related to not being invited to the Royal Wedding. Then again he made numerous attempts to try to date Princess Diana.
It’s a fortress, of course it is. As the embassy of the Great Satan to the Little Satan – as the unlamented Ayatollah Khomeini would have put it – it couldn’t not be a target and defended accordingly. The architects therefore decided to make it as nice a fortress as possible, a transparent, democratic, open, not-aggressive and environmentally responsible symbol of their country. It wants to combine, as James Timberlake of its Philadelphia-based architects put it, “security and sustainability”. And so, while its form resembles a castle keep with a moat, and while it observes such requirements as being set back from surrounding roads by 100ft, its concrete bulwarks come disguised as earthworks, and its anti-truck bollards are fig-leafed with hedges. The moat is an ornamental lake, and being set back is taken as an opportunity to create gardens, some of them accessible to the public without crossing any security lines. The quarters assigned to the marines who guard the complex are like a tasteful metropolitan hotel.
It helped that the supergalactic property prices of Mayfair meant that the billion-dollar cost of the new embassy could be financed by selling the old building, at no expense to the US taxpayer. Yet even if the move was driven by expediency, there is still something both brave and inspired about relocating to this unlikely area, which could then be transformed by the embassy’s arrival. It is not the US government’s fault that that opportunity was turned by former mayor Boris Johnson into what is becoming a Weinstein-o-rama of ill-planned luxury horndog high-rises.